The Warlock Rock Read Online Free PDF Page B

shrank as the spy-eye rose, then shot into a blur as it swept away.
    "Hypothesis: that the farther west we go, the more rocks we shall find, at an interval of approximately three hundred meters," Fess postulated, "and that each rock shall be harder, though we cannot test it…"
    "And darker!" Cordelia cried.
    "And with louder and more driving music!" Gregory added.
    "Harder, darker, and with more raucous music," Fess summarized. "Why do we extrapolate so?"
    "Why, because the farther west we go, the older the rocks must be!" Magnus said triumphantly.
    "A warranted inference, Magnus! Yet that insight should yield one more." The children were silent, staring at the screen.
    "I would I had had such a tutor," Gwen murmured.
    "Why, that the first rocks… must have come from the west country," Magnus said slowly.
    "Excellent, Magnus! And what does that, in its own turn, tell us?"
    "That the crafter who sent out the first rock must be also in the west," Gregory breathed. "I had forgot that there must needs have been a person who did make the first of these rocks." The scene steadied on the screen, and there it lay, neatly centered, a dark gray rock. Fess turned up the speaker, and twining music with a hard, quick beat boomed out at them. They winced, and the sound dwindled quickly. "Hypothesis validated," Fess said, with a trace of smugness.
    "I could use this form of thought to discover an enemy's camp," Geoffrey whispered.
    "It is a powerful tool," Fess agreed.
    "Yet this is not the only hypothesis involved," Gregory said, his little face puckered in thought.
    "Indeed?" There was an undertone of anticipation in Fess's voice.
    "We have tracked the trail of this one rock," Gregory said, "yet wherefore should the crafter have made but one?"
    His brothers and sister stared at him, startled, and Rod and Gwen shared a proud glance. Page 23
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    Then Cordelia said slowly, "Aye, 'tis unlikely. E'en an he did it solely for the pleasure of it, would he not have made many, to delight in his own prowess?"
    "That is possible." Fess carefully said nothing of the plague of songbirds that had struck the area around the Gallowglass house earlier that spring. "But how could we answer that question?"
    "An there were other rocks," Magnus said slowly, "they would have split and flown three hundred meters at a time, even as these did."
    "That is sensible, if we assume such rocks were identical to the ones we have already found." Magnus shrugged, irritated. "There is scant reason to think aught else. They should therefore be each at a distance north or south from each of these we've found, but at an equal distance east and west."
    "Why, how is that?" Geoffrey demanded.
    "Oh, see, brother!" Magnus said, exasperated. He caught up a twig and dropped down to sweep dead leaves aside, exposing bare earth, and scratched with the twig. "An the rocks begin from the crafter, there in the west—let this dot stand for him—then the rocks we've found sprang from him three hundred meters at a time, here… here… here… and so forth." He made a series of dots moving farther and farther east. "Yet if another stone so split, and sent forth offspring, 'twould be either hard by each of these—and we know 'tis not, for we'd have seen them—or at some little distance, here… here…
    here…" He punched another line of dots, moving farther north as they moved east. Then he froze, staring down at his own diagram.
    So did his parents.
    Slowly, Gregory reached in with another twig and punched another line of holes south of the original line, moving farther south as they moved east, then another line south of that, and another, and another…
    " Tis a set of circles," Cordelia breathed.
    "With a common center," Geoffrey agreed.
    "The term for such circles is 'concentric,'" Fess explained. Magnus looked thoughtfully at Fess. "There is no reason why this could not have happed, Fess."
    "I agree," the